Many products and materials have a limited "shelf-life." That is, many products, ranging from pharmaceuticals to food products to batteries, are "fresh" for only a certain amount of time. In the case of pharmaceuticals, a particular compound may begin to lose its efficacy a certain amount of time after the compound is manufactured. In the case of unopened packaged food products, even the best packaging may allow deterioration of the freshness and/or quality of many food products a certain amount of time after the product is prepared and packaged. Even photographic film can only be trusted to preserve those precious moments for a certain amount of time after the film is manufactured and packaged. Once opened, many packaged products, such as food, deteriorate in freshness and/or quality within an abbreviated period of time.
Many products are labeled with an expiration date in a form readable by the purchaser. Some products are labeled with a "freshness period" that applies to the product once the packaging is opened (e.g., use within 48 hours of opening).
Typically, the purchaser of such limited shelf-life products must manually control the inventory of such products. Manual control is especially typical of residential and personal use products such as food, prescription medicines, photographic film and the like.
Typically, the approach used to expiration-date an item would be to calculate the expiration date based on the date on which the product is being manufactured; stamp the label of the product with the appropriate expiration date; apply the label to all product items of the specified type that are manufactured on that day. Since many of the containers used to store expiration dated products are manufactured well in advance of being filled with a perishable item, it is not presently feasible to expect an item's bar code to express expiration date information. Consequently, the expiration date information applied to each item is printed or stamped on the item's packaging only when the products are ready to ship. For example, milk and yogurt are packaged in containers pre-printed with their appropriate UPC bar code. The expiration date information (i.e., good until xx/xx/xx) is stamped onto the label after the container is filled.
Because expiration date information is meant to be visually apparent to an ultimate consumer, such information is not expressed in electronic form (i.e., in bar code or RFID form). There is no efficient method by which expiration periods can be electronically acquired from an item's packaging and stored for processing and expiration date management by an ultimate consumer. Consumers must manually record freshness periods and engage in complex and time consuming inventory control activities in order to manage their food inventory. The problem becomes even more complex once it is realized that large classes of perishable goods, i.e., fresh fruits and vegetables, are not identified with any form of expiration date information.
Thus, there is a need for a system and method for acquiring expiration date and/or "freshness" information with respect to all classes of perishable goods and for simply and efficiently transferring this information to a consumer so that the consumer may maintain a perishable inventory control system with a minimum of effort, preferably without requiring any human intervention. The system and method should reflect not only an item's expiration date, but also the "freshness period remaining" after the package is open, as well as provide an alert when an item is approaching its expiration date.